The Korea Herald

[Leonid Bershidsky] Germans should review the lessons of Weimar

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made an impassioned call to his compatriots to “show our faces” against a rise in right-wing extremism. The plea is a stark warning that Germany should guard against succumbing to the kind of boiled-frog effect that ended up killing the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. There is some justification for the alarmism.Maas, a member of the Social Democratic Party or SPD, became the German right’s favorite hate figure as justice minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s go

Sept. 9, 2018

[David Ignatius] Working with Moscow on cyber regulation is like paying a bully for protection

Imagine a bully who’s pounding your head against a wall. When you complain that it hurts and threaten to punch back, he offers to sign an international agreement against bullying. Meanwhile, he keeps pounding your head. That’s a shorthand summary of the peculiar situation that has developed in UN discussions about regulating cyberspace. The Russians are aggressively hacking US and European political parties and infrastructure, according to US intelligence reports. At the same time, they are push

Sept. 9, 2018

[David Ignatius] Working with Moscow on cyber regulation is like paying a bully for protection

[Adam Minter] Secrecy fuels the stench of China’s diseased pigs

An outbreak of African swine fever has China’s meat eaters, investors and bureaucrats in a panic. That should be no surprise: The country is the world’s biggest pork producer and consumer, and has a history of food-safety and health scandals that have fueled public distrust.　The government’s response, in culling 38,000 pigs, has been quick and efficient this time. But public suspicion, fanned by the handling of previous incidents, is running high. Authorities are seeking to censor social media p

Sept. 9, 2018

[Børge Brende, Justin Wood] Can ASEAN turn geostrategic and technological disruption into opportunity?

Is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations resilient enough to thrive amid the regional and global transformations taking place today? While the global economy continues its broad-based expansion, disruptive economic, geostrategic and technological forces may threaten ASEAN’s gains of recent years. To survive, ASEAN members must make important decisions about the role of their community in regional affairs. With the right choices, the region can convert disruption into an opportunity for a r

Sept. 6, 2018

[Børge Brende, Justin Wood] Can ASEAN turn geostrategic and technological disruption into opportunity?

[Mac Margolis] Politics cost Brazil its national museum

We don’t yet know what set off the fire Sunday night that reduced Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum to a charred shell. Firefighters were still combing the ruins on Tuesday for clues to the blaze.　Brazil’s social media mobs weren’t waiting for the forensics. Factions blamed their favorite villains: ruthless bean counters, corrupt populists or the enemy du jour, hapless lame duck President Michel Temer.The finger-pointing did not begin with the fire. It was merely an accelerant to the political co

Sept. 6, 2018

[Mac Margolis] Politics cost Brazil its national museum

[Daniel Moss] Skipping Asia summits, at least Trump will do no harm

Donald Trump’s absence from Asia-Pacific summits will do little harm to America’s long-term standing in the region. It might even help.　The president’s decision to skip two international meetings in November was predictably seen as evidence of American neglect of a vital region, underscoring the unilateralist instincts of Trump. The complaints are fair.　But let’s not mistake pageantry for trends that have been building for years and look inevitable. American influence is waning in ways that a fe

Sept. 6, 2018

[Jean Pisani-Ferry] Europe could miss its opportunity for political realignment

“There are two sides at the moment in Europe. One is led by Macron, who is supporting migration. The other one is supported by countries that want to protect their borders.” This is how Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban described the European political landscape during his August meeting with the Lega party’s Matteo Salvini, the strongman in the Italian government. “If they want to see me as their main opponent, they are right,” French President Emmanuel Macron instantly replied.Both Orban a

Sept. 6, 2018

[Shira Ovide] Amazon at $1 trillion is more dream than reality

The stock market is a weighing machine of companies’ potential rather than their current circumstances. That is doubly true for Amazon.　Amazon on Tuesday briefly reached a stock market value of $1 trillion. It’s a meaningless (and unoriginal) milestone but a notable symbol for a company that until recently hardly looked like a world-shaking giant. Amazon’s market cap is six times what it was at this point in 2014, or a gain of $840 billion. It took Google 14 years to reach that stock market valu

Sept. 6, 2018

[Andrew Sheng] Remembering 1968

This year, baby boomers born after World War II like myself remember the 50th anniversary of 1968, when many of us came of age. 　I was studying at the University of Bristol that year, and it was illuminating that my generation of students were protesting against the Vietnam War in Paris, London and Washington, witnessing the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution in China and “flower power.” Bristol was then hardly the home of liberals, being a very middle-class redbrick university, but the protes

Sept. 5, 2018

[Alex Webb] Soccer fans, your team is coming after you

It’s easy to think of sports teams as massive companies: They have huge global exposure, millions of fans, and athletes on eye-popping salaries.　In reality, though, even the biggest teams are little more than minnows. The world’s wealthiest soccer team, Manchester United, has a market value of just $4.1 billion -- less than, say, Fevertree Drinks, a maker of tonic water and mixers with just 51 employees.　While the biggest teams have millions, if not hundreds of millions, of fans, they have histo

Sept. 5, 2018

[Satyajit Das] We may be facing textbook emerging market crisis

Emerging-market stresses have been building since at least 2013. Investors may have forgotten the effect of the “taper tantrum” on the “Fragile Five” -- Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa -- a term coined by Morgan Stanley to describe their vulnerability to capital outflows. Monetary accommodation, lower current-account deficits and growth disguised the underlying challenges, attracting more capital to those markets.　The textbook recipe for an emerging-market crisis requires a lar

Sept. 5, 2018

[David Ignatius] To get back in Syria game, US must prevent Idlib bloodbath

As the Syrian tragedy lurches toward a bloody final showdown in Idlib province, the Trump administration is struggling to check Russia and the Syrian regime from an assault there that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns would be a “humanitarian catastrophe.” The administration’s efforts are so late in coming, and so limited, that it’s hard to muster much hope they can reverse seven years of American failure. But at least the administration has stopped the dithering and indecision of the

Sept. 5, 2018

[David Ignatius] To get back in Syria game, US must prevent Idlib bloodbath

[Mac Margolis] Argentina’s Macri scores economic own goal

From debt vultures and cooked books to fiscal time bombs, Argentine President Mauricio Macri inherited quite the mess. In his three years of office, he has handled most of these challenges remarkably well, drawing cheers from investors and his compatriots. Here was a decisive, business-friendly manager, talking transparency and free market initiatives to end what might have been “the largest populist experiment” in the world, in the words of Oxford Economics analyst Guillermo Tolosa.　Now the muc

Sept. 5, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Riding the Seoul-Washington Express

Although Richard Brautigan tragically took his own life in 1984, before he died he left us some legendary literary classics such as “Trout Fishing in America.” This novel in particular has greatly influenced many other prominent writers, such as the celebrated Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. By the 1990s, Brautigan’s legacy was so strong that, in 1994, a young man named Peter Eastman actually changed his name to “Trout Fishing in America” and a young couple named their baby after the novel. F

Sept. 4, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Riding the Seoul-Washington Express

[Noah Smith] Why the US economy is having a boom

There’s no doubt that the US economy is in a boom. The Conference Board is reporting the highest levels of job satisfaction in more than a decade. This is probably because of a tight labor market -- the ratio between the unemployment level and the number of job vacancies is at its lowest level in a half-century.　A broader measure, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio, is back to 2006 levels. Meanwhile, real gross domestic product growth for the second quarter was just revised up to 4.2 p

Sept. 4, 2018

[Sandrine Devillard, Anu Madgavkar] A woman’s place is in the digital revolution

Digital technologies are a double-edged sword for the world’s women. Men’s greater access to these technologies puts women at risk of being left even further behind economically and socially. But if women can tap the full power of digital technologies, vital new opportunities will open up for them.According to estimates by the GSM Association, women’s access to the internet and mobile phones is about 85 percent of the level for men, on average, and a total of 1.7 billion women in low- and middle

Sept. 4, 2018

[Lee Jae-min] Striking a balance between data and privacy: A second try

Global trading norms have traditionally adopted a bifurcated approach: goods trade and services trade. These still constitute the two main pillars of trade agreements. Now, a fundamental change is in the offing. The arrival of artificial intelligence and the internet of things is now blurring the conventional line between goods and services. The two are now often combined, converged and integrated in one medium or product. Goods provide services, and services in turn put more goods for sale. Con

Sept. 4, 2018

[Lee Jae-min] Striking a balance between data and privacy: A second try

[John M. Eger] The new normal in education includes art, science

Well into the 1990s and certainly by 2000, any business that did not have the worldwide web or “dot-com” in its name was toast. We may have spent at least $2 trillion over three years to launch what is the internet of today. But this was only the beginning.　Outsourcing and offshoring soon followed. It’s cheaper, no question about it. We’ve seen a reduction in the cost of telecommunications; we’ve also seen a reduction in the cost of transportation. It doesn’t make sense to produce something your

Sept. 4, 2018

[Eli Lake] Iran’s fake news is a fake threat

As if the free world didn’t have enough to worry about with Russian fake news, now the world leader in state-sponsored terrorism is getting into the act: Iran is running a disinformation campaign on social media, and it is bigger than previously believed.　A closer look at this propaganda, however, reveals a paper tiger. Iran’s network of Twitter handles, websites and Facebook fakes are amateurish and clumsy. Anyone foolish enough to trust information from something called the “Liberty Front Pres

Sept. 3, 2018

[Eli Lake] Iran’s fake news is a fake threat

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] The myth of secular stagnation

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, some economists argued that the United States, and perhaps the global economy, was suffering from “secular stagnation,” an idea first conceived in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Economies had always recovered from downturns. But the Great Depression had lasted an unprecedented length of time. Many believed that the economy recovered only because of government spending on World War II, and many feared that with the end of the war, the economy

Sept. 3, 2018

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] The myth of secular stagnation